


In a Parallel Fashion

by nogoaway



Series: in the enraptured adoration [1]
Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Spoilers for S1E1, Spoilers for S1E11, spoilers for S1E10
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-28
Updated: 2015-12-28
Packaged: 2018-05-09 22:38:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5558207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nogoaway/pseuds/nogoaway
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He does not understand what Harold Finch wants from him. There is nothing left of John Reese to deconstruct, or dissolve; there is nothing left even to use.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In a Parallel Fashion

When Joss finds him, when _Harold_ finds him, he is nothing.

Life in the military and the intelligence services is a deconstructive process, breaking down the individual to fit them easily into the larger mechanism. Stripping them of independent thought, rebellion, personal desires and preferences, stripping them of everything but loyalty and technical proficiency. It's a time-worn tradition, this disassembly. It's how empires have always been built and maintained. Only the methods change, and those very little: it is not for no reason that John Reese knows Sun Tzu.

Thirty years of this, and John Reese is dismantled, all the particularities of him carved away like soft stone, until all that remains is the shape of a weapon. He is the red right hand of the devil, and Kara Stanton is the left. They clasp, and interlace, and finally, when the Wall has fallen and the satellites have come online and NAFTA has spread its intangible but unequivocal dominion over the world, when they are both more trouble than they're worth, they're sent down into the pit to destroy each other like the hungry dogs they are.

John Reese and Kara Stanton were trained to walk in the dark, but the new world has no dark places. Every corner is illuminated, every edge is seen by countless eyes, there are no dragons at the borders of the map. It's the information age. John Reese is obsolete.

Kara clasps hands to drag him down, and John lashes out, and he escapes, because as pared down as he is, as utterly dismantled, Jessica Arndt is still a thread that connects him to the world.

In the waiting room of a New Rochelle hospital, the thread snaps.

If the state and the military dissect, alcohol dissolves. Whatever is left of John, and it isn't much, wastes away with each swallow. He vanishes by increments, by mouthfuls.

He isn't prepared to kill himself outright. That would take a degree of planning, of intention, of will, that he no longer possesses. Instead he floats, waiting for death to come get him. It will happen sooner or later. It will happen when it happens.

Homelessness suits his dissolution. To be homeless in New York City is to become part of the scenery. John lives in plain sight and yet he has never been so invisible; so completely, willfully ignored. People go out of their way not to see him. It becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy; in the eyes of others, he is nothing. Not human. On the fringe of civilized life. With every nervous glance that meets his eyes and then slants away, he agrees. _Yes. I'm not here. I'm gone_.

Which is why, on the subway, he makes a mistake. Because the boy _sees_ him, the way a nervous young predator sees manageable prey: the sick, thin antelope at the edge of the herd. The one who will not be missed. That boastful, frightened gaze, forced to assert itself within the tribe or be dissolved, liquefied, as John is dissolved, liquefied; it solidifies him. Drags John out into the world again, a physical being, a human shape. He lashes out in space, a hard edge of a hand, a rough heel of a foot. He interacts, and for a moment, he is _here_ , and that terrifies him.

Jocelyn Carter sees him, too, one dismantled former soldier to another. John closes his mouth and does his best to dissolve into the hard-backed precinct chair. There is still too much humanness to her. What she recognizes in him is only a shell, a grid of empty signifiers: his posture, his left hook, the ten-hut set of his mouth, his thousand yard stare. All meaningless.

He has done things she cannot begin to imagine, and he is not here. He is gone.

So yes, John is nothing, when Harold finds him.

 _You don't know anything about me_ , John tells him, because _exactly everything_ or nothing at all, it's the same, at this point.

 _I think you and I can help one another_ , says this thin-boned bird of a man, draped in an overcoat so expensive that it perfectly mimics nothing special at all. He is a head and a half shorter than John and his limp is not, unlike the folded umbrella, an affectation. He moralizes at John as the rush of 42nd Street parts around them, two stones in the way of a river, and John considers all the myriad ways he could kill Harold Finch before either of his hired hands notice anything is wrong.

_______

John does not kill Harold Finch, but he does make off with his wallet. The cards are of no interest to him; he extracts the bills (all large, twenties and fifties, all crisp) and leaves the wallet in a dumpster.

He gets himself an expensive bottle of pure rye whiskey and a hotel room to drink it in, a bag of safety razors and a pair of scissors from the pharmacy, and leaves the rest on the dresser as a tip. He shaves before he starts drinking, rinsing the clogged blade out again and again until it's dulled, and then grabbing another one.

The man in the mirror is skeletal, carved to the bone. He does not understand what Harold Finch wants from him. There is nothing left of John Reese to deconstruct, or dissolve; there is nothing left even to use. Not sadness, not even anger.

But John misjudged Harold Finch, because Harold Finch is a craftsman, a tinker. He starts from scraps, coaxing them back to the fore. Helplessness. Rage. Something to work with.

 _You were halfway around the world when she was killed_ , and John _blazes_ , flares to life for a moment. He knows even as he feels it that it won't be enough. It will fade. It will fade and flow out of him and he'll be nothing again.

Diane Hanson will be his swan song, he decides. He'll do this one thing. If nothing else, the money already in the anonymous account Finch wires John's pay to will buy enough rye whiskey to stop him breathing.

John breaks into Diane Hanson's house and inhabits her for an hour, the same way he would with any mark. _Just like when you worked for the Agency_. He learns her through the objects she surrounds herself with, and the way she has arranged them. For the time being, he fills his empty space with her, and with habit; the mechanistic groundwork of surveillance. It's a temporary measure. A stay of execution.

_____

John has to go to court, and Harold Finch puts him in a suit.

This, too, is familiar. _I know what you're doing_ , he wants to say to Harold Finch, as the man's long, dexterous hands pull at seams and adjust the fall of fabric, dainty and precise. _The blonde woman. The identities. The suit. It won't work. I'm not really here._

He had expected the frigid, reserved Harold Finch to be room temperature, if not cold to the touch, but the fingertips that brush fussily over his shoulders and set his collar leave traces of human warmth. Harold Finch does not wear cologne, but his hair smells of citrus and pine. Whatever else of him is human is trapped under those tightly fitted layers.

When Harold Finch lets him down off the step-stool and hobbles back to his desk, John undoes one too many buttons on the dress shirt. The suit is no longer spook uniform.

He gets to work, and after John chases Michael Pope though the Lower East Side and plants a GPS tracker on him his heart remembers how to beat, his limbs and blood remember the chase. It pulses through him, insatiable, and he _needs_ \-- supplies. Tools for the job.

The gleeful rush of incapacitating all those men in a small space, the thrill of the added challenge ("Minimal force, Mr. Reese"), that's just a bonus. As are the smoke grenades.

 _Come get me_ , he thinks, as the SUV bears down on him, windshield moving into range-- close, he lets them come so close, because he can't kill the driver, he has _orders_ not to-- _come get me. I'm here._

The M79 kicking back against his shoulder, the thump of the round-- it echoes through him, a memory hungry to shake John apart, but he stands steady, steady, solid and deadly still.

________

John gets Michael Pope to safety before sun up, and wakes on the library sofa to find Harold Finch watching him with a curious expression. He's holding a paper tray of coffee cups and a plastic bag full of takeout containers.

"Dinner, Mr. Reese," he says, "as well as breakfast, I'm afraid."

It's meat and vegetables, starches and grains.  John tears through it all, ravenous, feels it moving through him, filling him in a way food hasn't in a long, long time.

"It seems I underestimated the extent of your malnourishment." Finch frowns. "I will endeavor to have meals available in the future."

John licks barbecue sauce off his fingers, and Finch looks away from him abruptly.

_______

John watches the entire thing go tits up through the scope of an AK, and it's the familiarity of it, that moment of betrayal, that distracts him enough for Lionel Fusco to walk up behind him and put a gun to his head.

 _Take care of him,_ says Diane Hanson, and John remembers this, too, waking in the back of a moving car with his hands bound and his cheek broken.

He could just let it happen. The more efficient method. This could be the sooner or later. This could be it happening when it happens.

The sun on his face is warm, and bright. He fingers the pin on the smoke grenade. The crash might kill him. It might not.

 _I'm considering sticking around New York for a while_ , John says, and he lets Lionel Fusco live, because he might need him tomorrow, or the tomorrow after that.

__________

"I'll have to have this cleaned." Back in the library, Finch pulls the suit jacket off John's pleasantly sore arms and holds it away from himself like a dirty rag. "And you've managed to lose two buttons. I anticipated this, and ordered some spares. They'll be arriving in the morning."

John rolls his neck and shoulders, aching from impact and exertion. He's aware of his body. It moves where he tells it, it feels heat and cold and texture. It binds him to the world. It's grown weak and thin, but he'll fix that.

Harold Finch hands him another takeout container, along with a small mountain of napkins.

John grins up at him. It feels strange on his face. "Is that a hint, Finch?"

Finch's mouth purses. "Do not eat near the computers, Mr. Reese."

There's a small plastic bag in the container, next to the meatball sub. John fishes it out with his fingers.

"A multivitamin, and a variety of supplements," Finch explains, when John gives him a questioning look. "You've lost a lot of muscle mass, Mr. Reese." His mouth twists with disgust. "Also, a broad-spectrum benzimidazole. You have roundworm, which I suspect you picked up on your most recent trip to South America."

Finch hands him a bottle of water, and John swallows the pills without complaint, without checking to see whether they are what Finch says they are.

It's not that he trusts Finch. But he knows enough of him, now. He's watched him work.

Harold Finch is a tinker. And little by little, he builds John up again. Remakes John in his image. And John lets him, because it's enough.

_______

 _It's time to come home_ , says Mark Snow, and he's so wrong, so utterly, profoundly ignorant that John can only smile at him.

This is it. This is when it happens. Instinct takes over. John fires back. He drags himself to the stairwell.

He calls Finch to say thank you. To say goodbye, because Finch has made him the kind of man who says goodbye, instead of the kind who stands silently in an airport terminal and lets his life walk away from him.

 _Stay away_ , John says, drenched in cold sweat and bleeding out from too many wounds. Footsteps clatter and clang in the stairwell above him. Carter or Snow, it doesn't matter. He's in a late stage of blood loss. He'll be unconscious in less than a minute. Snow will double tap him in the head, Carter will call a bus, which will be too late. Either way, this is when it happens. This is John's sooner or later.

 _Don't even risk it_ , John says, and means it, but he also means, _it's enough. You've done enough. I'm ready_.

He falls, and Finch catches him.

John does not die in Harold Finch's arms, but he does bleed on Finch's tartan waistcoat.

_______

He swims in and out, in the morgue, unsure if he's dreaming. It's cold, and everything is pale and green; his stomach is wet. The fabric of his shirt and pants are wet, and cold. Finch is wearing a mortician's coat appropriated from a hook near the door. John watches Finch's bobbing throat as Finch wheels him down the hall, watches Finch's frightened, sweaty face as Farouk Madani does things to John's body that he does not feel.

Finch does not leave during the procedure. When Madani moves to John's leg, Finch takes John's hand and holds it fast. It's John's left hand, and it is the only part of his body that is warm.

John hears "I'm here, Mr. Reese," and floats out and away and back again like a docked dinghy, tethered to the shore.

**Author's Note:**

> "A human being is a being who is constantly ‘under construction,’ but also, in a parallel fashion, always in a state of constant destruction." --Jose Saramago.
> 
> Sequel: Some Strong, Rare Spirit


End file.
